Trientalis borealis
Seven stamens twist
like one-legged strangers
at a station, anxious to avoid
each other’s gaze.
The train hasn’t come,
might never come.
The snow gives off a radiance
like a face at the bottom of a well.
The platform shakes
on its slender stalk. We are
in this together, & the stars
are closer than we think.
Viola pubescens
Long after the yellow funfair tent
with its sudden shower of pollen
& its sweet prize has been packed away,
after the bees have gone
in search of other diversions
& the forest has grown dark & thick,
the violet hosts a quieter, stranger sideshow:
the cleistogamous flower, a tent
that never opens & admits nobody.
Like a Wall Street investment firm
writing I.O.U.s to itself, it has
all the magic it needs
within its green inviolate room.
We may infer the success of its transactions
only from its conversion
Above the road bank where
the hepatica has just come
into bloom, carrion beetles
clamber through the quills
of a dead porcupine.
Spring azure butterflies ring
what’s left of its mouth—
a void spanned by a pair
of yellow rails—
& ignore the blossoms
swaying on their downy stems
in all the colors of the sky,
white & pink & blue.
The snow hasn’t been gone a week,
but already life & death
seem far apart. The rusty leaves
shining viscera
I want to pick out
all the hairs
Podophyllum peltatum
I’m trying to get lost
somewhere south along the mountain
when I break through a tangle
of fox grapes & stop short:
an insurgent sea of mayapples
bobs in the breeze, a minature forest.
I remember the stories I’ve heard
about human-shaped roots
& how they’ve yielded a new
weapon against cancer.
I think of them crowded together
in the stoney dark.
We who eulogize private virtue
& small acts of kindness,
have we forgotten the glory
So you tore yourself away
from news of revolution
to stand under an umbrella in the woods
as the trees made rain?
Yes. The news means nothing
if I close my eyes & ears.
But what did you see?
Not the trees & ice around you—no.
But a pressed-down people
righting themselves with a shower
of broken shards, bowed limbs rising,
rising.
Those were incommensurable events.
There was nothing the trees could’ve done
to resist their liberation.
And what did you do
Anemone quinquefolia
Sheltered when small by
the three deeply cut leaves,
this so-called windflower
sways on its thin stalk even
from the wake of a passing fly.
Its pale sepals serve
as an almost mirror
for the April sun,
warming the sexual organs,
perhaps even helping to attract—
in lieu of nectar or fragrance—
the solitary bees that bring it
carnal knowledge of its mates.
Veined like flesh drained of color,
sometimes flushed pink underneath,
Dicentra cucullaria
These are no knickers, Dutch or otherwise,
but a yellowed tooth the bumblebee drills for nectar
with her long strong tongue.
Where some see underwear, others —
judging from the common names — see hats,
white hearts or earrings, even butterfly collections.
It’s useful to know what you’re looking at.
Some wasps have learned how to steal nectar
by chewing a hole at the top,
where the Dutchman’s foot would go
into the breech.
I once spotted a white crab spider
hanging from the end of the line
like one more flower,
waiting for an undiscriminating drinker,
Beginnings
This thing called a fetish embodies
what can never be touched.
Its odd contours–all lump & twist
& rag-end–are best kept out of view.
To see it exposed, one must assume
the burden of its origins, one must
remake oneself. It lives
in a buried season, carboniferous.
It is the solid shadow
we abandoned in the womb.
Three thousand feet down where
an unmanned vehicle probes
the ocean like an endoscope,
a sudden carnival float ripples
into view: Siphonophore!
The scientists all rotate toward
the monitor, open-mouthed
as shepherds at the hush of wings
not grown for any air we know.
Siphonophore. Free of all
hard parts, including that nugget
the self. Corporate being
whose members are truly members—
co-dependent, specialized
as organs in a body, most
made of clear gelatinous tissue
On the 30th day of August, 1700,
I ordered water to be drawn from the ditches
where the wormy sheep drank
& when I came home, & was busy viewing
the multiplicity of very small animals
drifting through the water, I saw
very many great round particles
of the bigness of a corn of sand
moving & revolving in the water.
Their outward skin was quite set over
with protruberant parts, which seemed
triangular & pointed towards the end,
all orderly & equally distant,
so that on one small body did stand
about two thousand. This was to me
a very pleasant sight, because as often
I knew her the way a lake knows a mountain:
from the top down.
Through careful reassembly after every breeze.
I knew her the way a clown knows boredom:
better than I knew that absurdity my self.
I knew her the way an ear candle knows an ear:
through the most intimate of failures
& the sincerest form of flattery.
I knew her the way the night knows lightning:
by inference from the series of missing moments.